Amnesty International Is Suing The British Government. Here's Why.

Amnesty International is suing the British government for its involvement in the NSA and GCHQ spying scandal.

Suspecting its communications were secretly placed under surveillance, Amnesty International, the human rights organisation, is taking legal action against the British government for its involvement in the NSA and GCHQ spying scandal exposed by Edward Snowden. Programme director for law and policy, Michael Bochenek, tells Forbes why.

Filing a claim at the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, or IPT, Amnesty argues that Britain’s alleged involvement in the worldwide surveillance dragnet breaches articles 8 and 10 of the UK’s Human Rights Act. These are, respectfully, the right to privacy and the right to freedom of expression. However, there are “very well founded concerns” about the IPT’s lack of transparency, so Amnesty is seeking a formal acknowledgment on whether or not it was spied on, while advocating for an open hearing. As Bochenek told the Guardian earlier this week, it would be a “ridiculous irony if the investigation into surveillance that has been carried out in secret was itself secret”.

Amnesty International’s work is highly sensitive. The group is in contact with activists around the world who risk persecution in their own countries, and as such, the potential for its communications to have been intercepted, and even seen by third parties, is “the kind of thing that keeps us awake at night.”

“Let’s say a phone call or email gets intercepted, is taken out of context and disassociated from the larger conversation – let’s say a couple of years later it’s picked up and that person is identified, you can imagine the longer term dangers of storing and then using this kind of data with no constraints,” Bochenek says. “As far as we can tell, this is with no safeguards to make sure that private conversations aren’t inappropriately intercepted and improperly used.”

As demonstrated when a committee of British politicians grilled Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger over the paper’s Snowden coverage, communications policy is currently based on outmoded notions of national borders – conflicting with the inherently global nature of the internet. But this opens up alluring technicalities that can be exploited. Just as the United States was alleged to have bent the law to spy on US citizens, if British security agencies find obtaining domestic information too difficult, it’s possible for them to ask “the US or other agencies to obtain information they themselves would not be able to attain,” Bochenek says.

“In other words, they are exploiting a massive loophole in the law,” Bochenek claims. “The idea that you go to a court, get a warrant, show that you have an individualized basis for suspicion, these are all the kinds of things we’ve come, very reasonably, to expect, and that are required by human rights law. The UK legal framework allows this gap, that it only applies domestically, and doesn’t recognize the way information flows in the modern age.

“We know that anything we’re doing now, on the phone, on computers, sending information through the internet, will take the cheapest route, not the most direct route,” Bochenek says. “We know that a lot of this stuff is going through servers in the United States – this phone call is likely going through servers in the United States, or for that matter any number of other countries that may have intelligence agencies with an interest in obtaining information in a broad and overreaching way.”

Where will real change and culpability come from if not a shift in policy? “Policy does need to change, that’s absolutely true,” Bochenek says. “There’s no reason why surveillance agencies can’t as a matter of policy adopt the kind of protection that we would expect government agencies to be operating under.

“Obviously, the nature of litigation is that it’s a long road to go. We hope, through this claim and other claims, through the public hearing we hope is afforded as a result of this claim, a lot of these issues will be resolved at the level of policy, of legislation, and without the need for a court order.”

For allegedly complicit nation states, they would be wise to consider just how undemocratic and non-transparent citizen surveillance threatens to undermine their ability to interact on the geopolitical stage.

When asked if there is a certain double standard to preaching human rights abroad while embroiled in this sort of behavior at home, Bochenek says it certainly raises questions about commitments and obligations that have already been signed onto as a matter of law: “You would think, and hope, that governments recognize if they fall into this trap of not practicing what they preach, their ability to conduct diplomacy is negatively affected.”

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